In recent years, we have witnessed what can be called a “copy and paste attitude”. What is partially to blame is obviously human laziness – or the minimax principle, if you will: to get the most with minimal effort. A prominent and currently much discussed example is the book of a german teenager who copied considerable parts of the book from an internet blogger – without citing the source. When confronted with this allegation, she stated that basically that there is no originality, but authenticity.
However, she later apologized for the copying but maintained her initial claim of originality.
Maybe this is just a precursor of more things to come. With the arrival of the internet of user generated content, we can expect to experience more cases like this in the future. As noted by Lawrence Lessig in his book, we need a culture that respects sources; if a person tries to make money from works of other people by remixing them, it should be a matter of course that the original sources also get their fair share. The same goes for software: copying and pasting source code from various Web pages without crediting the source of the work is common. The problem is to find a mechanism to share the revenue on a large scale. The Xanadu project from the late sixties tried to build something like this: a system consisting of hyperlinked documents where each linked part was available only once. There would have been no copies and it would have been possible to track every portion of a hyperlinked document to its originator. In combination with a kind of information franchise, this would have given the content creators a stream of revenue. However, the project ran into a lot of troubles and the developers never created a functional prototype.
On a related note, albeit on a different level, the Liquid Pub Project shares a similar goal: to build highly reusable and composable content for university lectures and publications.
We, from ikangai, also gave this some thought. In a nutshell, we suggest to build information communities where every member shares his or her content. If the content is used in a commercial manner, the revenue is split between the community members and the person making profit. We envision something like 20 per cent for the community and the rest for the person making the profit. However, there are considerable obstacles to overcome. For example, what to do with freeloaders that are just members without sharing anything at all? A potential approach to solve this issue could be the use of a mechanism that only splits among actively contributing community members. Well, these are merely initial thoughts and we will continue to think and blog about this very interesting topic.
One final note on the Axolotl case: it’s a somewhat bitter irony that the girl’s work is now protected by copyright law, so anyone who uses the content of the book in the same manner as the author will be sued by the publisher.
Your ikangai team
. We are currently in the process of writing an iPhone app for the so-called S-Cube Knowledge Model, which is a collection of definitions in the area of Web Services and Web Service related Technologies. There are – of course – some challenges for the representation of content on a small device like an iPhone, but we are very optimistic that we will master these and be able to provide a useful application with some interesting ideas concerning the user interface.
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